Tumulus : WP Cumulus for Typepad (english version)

"Tumulus" is an Flash based tag cloud widget which uses scripts based on Roy Tanck's WP Cumulus plugin for Wordpress and Steve Pringett's MT Cumulus. My team was eager to use Roy's original Cumulus plugin on our MT Blogs but as I'm a fellow Typepad user, I had to find how to convert it to use it on mine. The result of this work is the widget you can see in my banner displaying the categories of my blog. Just hover your mouse over the Flash object to make it work.

To make it work on Typepad, it's really easy but you need to use advanded templates to make it dynamic :

1) Start by downloading :
http://yannicklejeune.blogs.com/blog_management/flash/swfobject-download.js
http://yannicklejeune.blogs.com/blog_management/flash/tagcloud-download.swf

2) Click the Control Panel tab to access your Control Panel area. Then click the Files tab to enter your File Manager.
3) Put your files in any convenient folder
4) Click the Design sub-tab under the Weblogs tab and Click Current Design
5) Create a module called "tumulus"
6) In that module, insert following code (don't add or remove any extra space) replacing FULL HTTP PATH by the path of your files :

<script type="text/javascript" src="PUT FULL HTTP PATH/swfobject-download.js"></script>
<div id="mttagcloudflash">Tumulus by <a href="http://www.yannicklejeune.com">Yannick Lejeune</a>, <a href="http://www.roytanck.com/">Roy Tanck</a> and <a href="http://www.6000rpms.com">Steve Pringett</a> requires Flash player 9 or better.</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var rnumber = Math.floor(Math.random()*9999999);
var so = new SWFObject("PUT FULL HTTP PATH/tagcloud.swf?r="+rnumber, "mttagcloudflash", "500", "500", "9", "#FFFFFF");
so.addParam("allowScriptAccess", "always");
so.addParam("quality", "high");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addVariable("tcolor", "0x000000");
so.addVariable("tspeed", "100");
so.addVariable("distr", "true");
so.addVariable("mode", "cats");

var categorylist = "";

<MTCategories>
    <MTBlogIfArchives archive_type="Category">
categorylist +=    encodeURI('<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>" title="See posts in <$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a> (<$MTCategoryCount$>)<br />')
    <MTElse>
    </MTElse>
    </MTBlogIfArchives>
</MTCategories>

so.addVariable("categories", categorylist);
so.write("mttagcloudflash");

</script>

6) Configure the way your cloud appears by changing parameters in the javascript. Full documentation is provided here.

7) Go to your sidebar template (or any place you want to put your cloud into) and add :
<MTInclude module="tumulus">

8) Rebuild your blog, it should work.

Please leave any question in comments, I'll provide answers as soon as possible.